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Top of the encrusted surface of a brachiopod shell, showing the "war" between an edrioasteroid (star-shaped organism at center) and a fast-growing bryozoan colony. From Sprinkle and Rodgers 2010.
Back in the early days of paleontology, when the meaning and origin of fossils was still in doubt, some…

Sheril over at The Intersection seems to be confused about what the coolest invertebrate is. She goes so far as to call out PZ about his hyper-infatuation with Cephalopods. Let's face it there is no way an echinoderm, especially a holothurian, can come anywhere near the coolness of a Mollusk.…

A little archaeological conundrum found its solution this morning. At an excavation in Motala in the early 00s, colleagues of mine found a cupped piece of hard, greyish brown material with a distinctly patterned inside. They interpreted it as a piece of a lost-wax casting mould and suggested in a…

The Washington Post is sponsoring the onBeing project thatis a project based on the simple notion that we should get to know one another a little better. What you'll find here is a series of videos that takes you into the musings, passions, histories and quirks of all sorts of people. The essence…

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Wow. Every person on the planet saw one version or another of this "Octopolis" story and had to send it to me. It was the subject of a Friday Cephalopod a year ago, you know.
Apparently, this is the second octopus city discovered, which is interesting -- they're exhibiting more complex social…

First, a little background:
When squid mate, a male transfers its sperm to a female enclosed in complex structures called spermatophores. These are accumulated in the spermatophoric sac, a storage organ inside the mantle cavity, before ejaculation through the penis. Squid that spawn in shelf waters…

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“Devote yourself, but do not lose who you are!” -Marvel vs. Capcom
With Thanksgiving behind us, it's officially the holiday season here in the USA (and in many other places across the world), and so it's time to kick that off with a great holiday song by Calexico,
Gift X-change,
and to check out the fusion of two great holiday traditions: video games and seasonal sweaters!
Image credit:…

I'm sitting in a hotel in Utah at the PQE 2013 conference. As I write this, the temperature is a rather brisk 19F. (For everyone else in the world, -7.2C) That's not cold at all to some of you, but some of you didn't grow up in south Louisiana.
Once a year they let us grad students out of the basement!
Either way, on the Kelvin scale the weather here is still a balmy 267 degrees above absolute…

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet." -William Shakespeare
Up in the night sky, just a few degrees away from Orion, one of the most identifiable constellations in the winter sky, lies a cluster of newly formed stars.
Image credit: Stellarium. As always, click on all images for the highest-res version available.
5,000 light years away, this cluster…